Like Clockwork
by Aerama
Summary: It was a long while before I understood why he couldn’t love me as well.' A chorus girl is entranced by the Phantom, but Christine has captivated his soul. A mixture of the books and movie with some stretching, interpretation, and invention.
1. Time Set in Motion

_We rustle out of the practice room, futilely hushing each other as we settle ourselves on the landing to peer through the banister, squealing as someone kneels on someone's skirt, or pulls someone's hair ribbons. The hallway below, dimly-lit by lowered gas lights, is full of closed doors; everyone but us has gone to attend to the opera._

_Everyone except for him._

_Every night, like clockwork, when the music soars from the opera, he appears below in the hallway, from a door beyond our sight. He wanders to the end of the staircase, singing as only he could sing, hauntingly, trailingly, powerfully…wistfully…_

…_And each night I am drawn to him. _

We're called understudies, but we're really just glorified chorus girls. We have to learn more than one part, we have to step in at a moment's notice, and we have to stay in the opera house during the performances in case we are needed. It would be fun if we were needed more; it's too much to hope that we might be given actual roles. Instead, if we're not lingering backstage or in the wings, we're expected to sit in the old practice room down the hall from the doors that led eventually to the stage. Some cunning architect had fashioned it so that the orchestra and voices were piped into the room, so that we'd be ready to jump into the role if called. Anything is better than that stifling place, but tonight we all felt more than disgusted at waiting for a call that never came.

Meg Giry is always telling us to be patient. She started out just as we did, and in fact is still only in the singing dance corps, but she's always on the stage, doing the work she's been trained for, the work she loves. Besides, there's no "only" about it for her; this is all she ever wanted to be. Only a fool would think she's not proud of it, though one can tell that her mother had once had other aspirations for her. Just like some of us once had other aspirations for ourselves.

As a friend and a success in anyone's eyes, we look on Meg with awe tempered by familiarity. After all, she's very near to us, being Madame Giry's daughter, and she understands what we're going through. She never seems to think, as we often do, that we're just an unneeded addition to the Opera House, too blindingly new as yet to have the company's confidence, too old to be tossed the minimal, childish parts. Meg condoles with us often, often unconsciously teaching by example. We stop listening, though, when she extols her great friend, Christine Daae.

Christine is as unlike Meg as a distant star is to our own warm sun; where Meg showers hope and laughter upon us, Christine barely seems to touch our world at all. It's not that she's haughty or ill-tempered; she's just remote, as if she's listening to something only she can hear; reserved, as if she's keeping the glowing rose of her soul for something greater than this. And we all know she's something greater than this. Meg upholds her as an example of what can happen to chorus girls who work hard: Christine is the understudy to the great Carlotta, after all. Meg could have been too, we swear loyally, but the fact remains that Christine isn't proud of still being a chorus girl, and that's the difference between them.

It's true that Christine's voice isn't as tremulous as it used to be. I don't know what's changing it, and despite their assertions, none of my friends really do either. I never hear her practice all the hours she must be, to improve as much as she has, almost overnight. Of course, she could have hidden it all until the time was right to show what she could do, but then why be content as Carlotta's understudy? What is she waiting for?

What she was waiting for, of course, we learned all too soon.

So there we all were that first night it happened, piled up in the practice room: Leonie, Adele, Sami, Liana, Vedette, Amy, Phillipa, and my own especial friend, Liliana. It was a perverse decision to come up here instead of our usual backstage haunts, but it was symbolic of our defiance of the opera's rejection of us. We heard the opening bars of the orchestra begin to alert the sluggards to their seats and quieted despite our professed indignation.

It's a pity that so many never hear the intricate melodies as closely as they should. No, the patrons are too busy chattering, flirting, nibbling, putting up eyeglasses, taking down eyeglasses, rearranging their seating, laughing too loudly, and above all, noticing who is noticing them, to bother to listen to the genius the overture really holds, one which requires quiet, and sympathy, to understand. At least we heard the music by itself, tinny though it sounded, in that hated room.

It was a new opera, _Hannibal_, though it wasn't new to us anymore, being all we'd lived and breathed on for the past few months in rehearsals, and now for a few weeks in its live run. I tried to listen to it as if for the first time, as the audience would, so as to capture the beauty of it that we'd all first heard. It worked somewhat.

When the chorus came on, naturally we all swore we could hear Meg's treble-like sweetness among the rest, and Christine's coloratura. Despite her remoteness, we have to admire her for the mere power of her voice, the pureness of its tone; the same way we have to admire Carlotta, though she has a different kind of soprano. Oh, Carlotta hits those high notes; conquers them and brings them down to her overblown, rather shrill level, I should say. It is not a style I admire. Yet the crowd adores her and wouldn't even notice Christine in the blending of the voices. But we do. There's something in how she reaches for and embraces the escalating climbs her voice aspires to; and how the notes instead of resigning themselves to be sung rather joyously toss her higher.

Through many nights like this one, we were sterling judges of the ill-likelihood of being needed. We had already gauged from the last-minute, botched run-throughs earlier in the day that we wouldn't be required to rush on stage between scene changes to fill in a sudden absence. Something about how the singing flowed now cemented our opinion: Carlotta was yet again not going to relinquish her starring role, Christine would not be able to step into her place, Liana (or I) wouldn't need to step into Christine's place, and so forth. And yet we had to remain in the Opera House, moldering away in our costumes for the opportunity that never came, making faces at ourselves in the mirrors.

One can only arrange one's hair so many different ways; tie so many different kinds of bows; play so many games of jackstraws and guessing. We didn't want to practice and wouldn't have if we needed it. It's no wonder that we found something else to do with our free time.

"Let's go out in the hallway," suggested Leonie, a fox-faced girl given to restlessness. "Let's have a race."

I sighed and looked at Lili. Neither of us was particularly fond of running, but there really was nothing else to do. At least we had no stays to constrict us. As Hannibal's slave girls, we really didn't have much on at all.

I don't know how many of the others felt the same as we did about running at that point, but as no better suggestion presented itself, we all trooped out into the bright hallway, which Leonie quickly resolved by dimming the gas lights nearest us to the point of extinguishing them. It wouldn't do to have instant recognition in case someone came by, after all.

We conscientiously left the door open so we could hear the music of the opera, yet we found that we could hear it quite well from down the hall, even though the doors that led to the main part of the Opera House were usually kept closed. Perhaps someone had left them ajar. I found the mingling of the same sounds from different directions to be almost tangible in the air. For a moment, I could almost reach out and become part of them.

"Two by two," ordered Leonie, unconcerned by any such ethereal fancies, "all the way down to those lamps at the end. And you, Sami, go down to the end and mark who comes in first. We'll send down a replacement when it's your turn to race. Well, what's the matter?"

"Don't want to," said Sami, who never liked to be inconvenienced. "Besides, they have to come back anyway, why not make it a double length, and mark who comes in first down here?"

"All right, if you'll just keep your eyes open," sighed Leonie.

"Don't want to," said Sami.

"Fine," said Leonie. She turned to me. "Rae, will you mark time until it's your turn to race?"

"Sure," I said, shrugging, inwardly pleased that she'd asked instead of commanded. "I've nothing else to do."

"That's why we're doing this." With that, Leonie split everyone up into pairs. My partner was Amy, who was like me in size and leg length, though I would never have her magnificent figure.

I knelt down on the floor, my back to the banister, the better to see whose feet flashed by first on the arbitrary line Leonie indicated. Amy stayed standing, leaning against the railing next to me. And so she was the first to notice.

The two girls first up, Adele and Liana, were all crouched over ready to start when Amy gave a sudden hiss.

"What's the matter?" I hissed back, thinking nothing more than that she'd pinched herself between the bars. I looked up to see her half-turned, peering over the banister to the corridor below.

"Down there – in the hallway," Amy responded, twisting around all the way. Low as her voice was, the others heard the urgency in it, and her stiffened attention brought them to crowd around us. I turned around on my knees and squinted through the gloom of the dimly-lit corridor below.

Everything looked as it always did; faded couches dragged out from the main galleries to reside here, with no partisan eyes to offend; ornate pictures with the gilding half-rubbed off their frames; red and golden fleur-de-lis paper, flaking where it met the sky blue ceiling covered with aging gods and goddesses; ancient grandfather clock next to the old, smoked-glass doors way off to the side. Then I saw what she had seen.

Reaching out from below our vantage point was a path of light on the floor running parallel to the staircase, widening as if from an opening door. And at that moment, the clock began to strike.

Of one accord, the girls all sank down to peer through the banister, Amy included.

"That's odd," I heard Adele murmur beneath the tolling of the clock. "I only know of one door next to the staircase there, and that doesn't lead anywhere."

Lili and I exchanged glances over Amy's head. We knew something about that door, or rather what was behind it, but that had been a forbidden excursion we had kept to ourselves.

Unfortunately, Leonie's sharp eyes on Lili's other side had caught us.

"What are you--" she started to say, when Amy urgently shushed us.

"Something's there!"

We huddled closer together as if for comfort, and perhaps it was. For there on the light-lined pathway the shadow of a figure could be seen moving forward.

"Who could it be?" whispered Phillipa, gulping as Vedette, the oldest of us, fiercely hushed her.

The figure itself came beneath our line of vision, and we saw our first glimpse of the Phantom.

There could be no doubt that it was he; though none of us had ever seen him before, tales of him had circulated through Paris long before we'd ever arrived, awe-struck, on the Opera House steps. It was a prestige to be trained here, after all, and our parents dismissed the tales as did mostly everyone else. Yet the stories remained; and surely there had to be some truth since there were so many. Opera corps are rife with superstition; there are even superstitions about superstitions.

And yet I don't think any of us truly believed in his existence for all that until we saw that shadow walking, saw the outline of a broad-brimmed hat, the swirl of an evening cloak. He halted then, facing forward, the hat and the fall of his cloak shrouding him. Odd that a ghost, even an Opera Ghost, needed a hat and cloak, I mused, strangely calm. Was he…was he even a ghost at all? For a moment, I felt content to sit there and puzzle out his existence, as if this weren't the most potentially dangerous thing that had ever happened to us. Most of those tales were not of a particularly kind Ghost, after all.

Perhaps thinking of this, others were not so sanguine, and made movements as if to flee. Leonie and Vedette between them managed to keep everyone silent and still so as not to attract his attention. All of their anxiety seeped through to me and I was just starting to wish I were not next to the top of the stairs, when the music in the air swelled anew with the second Act, and the apparition began to sing.

Sweet, haunting, powerful tones joined those of the rousing chorus, entwining magic with his single voice around the best of theirs. There had never been anything so joyously sorrowful, so darkly rapturous; I would have wept to hear it had his voice not unearthed emotion beyond tears. One of those emotions rejoiced that whatever it was, it was no ghost singing, it just couldn't be...

When he began to sing the arias, infusing seduction beneath deceptive simplicity, what mattered that it was a soprano role, with Carlotta screeching her way to the top of her range? All the rules had been swept away so utterly that to adhere to their memory seemed unthinkable blasphemy. His voice sought deep inside me, finding in me the echo of what I could have been. Of what I still could be.

And yet at the same time it was as if heaven were reaching down to the earth, unable to keep itself away from its child, even knowing it would destroy it at a touch.

Transfixed, I scarcely noticed that he had wandered to the end of the staircase and was half-turned toward us, thus making it easier for him to see us if he chose. His hat was tilted so that what light there was shone palely on his mouth, paler still on something that began above his lips. Music trembled then from another place, room, world; and all I knew was that voice before me, that voice that was calling to me alone. In response to that call, I edged away from the safety of the banister and to the top of the stairs.

The last chorus began, and there his voice took on a triumphant note; it shadowed a pure voice rising out of the chorus, shadowed and danced with and chased and, at the end, caught and caressed. The song ended, the voices ended, and crashing applause came down the hall.

I found that I was poised at the top of the stairs as if I were going to creep down them, his voice still resonating in my ears. My friends were hissing at me to come back, or I'd get caught by him, yet somehow I wanted to be caught by him…he started to turn further toward the stairs, toward us; a moment longer and he'd see me…and I was pulled away.

Without time for a backwards glance, I was rushed into the practice room. The door closed behind me with a finality that jolted me out of my reverie. Everyone milled around me in shock, except for Amy, who wedged a chair beneath the doorknob.

"What were you thinking?" demanded Leonie, coming right up and shaking me, her voice an unwelcome rasp to my suddenly burning ears.

"I…I don't know," I said with difficulty. "I don't know what happened."

"Rachelle, he could have seen you! You were halfway down the stairs!" exclaimed Liana, eyes round.

"No, she wasn't," said Lili, putting her arms around me protectively. "She was just at the top. He wouldn't have seen her, the lights were too low."

"You didn't see her and I did, she was practically beckoning to him, the Lord knows what would have happened to you," frowned Leonie.

"She was not beckoning him!" exclaimed Lili, though she looked at me in puzzlement as I failed to defend myself. I don't know why I couldn't. It was as if I were in the grip of something greater than myself, as if a vow of silence had been laid over me, unwillingly enforced by my own confusion.

"What do you think would have happened?" cut in Adele, appearing at Leonie's side. The eager expression in her face annoyed me, and seemed to annoy Leonie as well, for she gave Adele a look of disgust and flounced off.

"Adele, did you want something to happen to Rachelle?" asked Vedette mildly. Adele flushed at her words where she had not at Leonie's disgust, and gave me a rueful smile.

"No, no, of course not…it's just…he's fascinating, isn't he?" said Adele, evidently thinking she was switching to a safer topic.

"I found him frightening," said Lili, and the others murmured agreement.

I made sounds of agreement too, but inwardly something quite different was going on.

I didn't find him frightening, and I didn't want Adele to not find him frightening.

"But the music of his voice," persisted Adele. "He can't be a ghost, ghosts couldn't sing like that!" She looked around for support, but I dropped my eyes before she could meet them. Again I didn't want her to even guess at what I had divined.

"I've heard that ghosts could," rejoined Phillipa.

Sami snorted. "What do you know about ghosts? Besides, what ghost wears a mask?"

Mask? I thought. Of course, that's what it had to have been; I knew the tales. I almost said something about that, even knowing that it would draw their attention back to me, but everyone was off in a discussion of spectre versus substance.

I let their conversation draw away from me and looked around for a corner to hide myself in so I could think in peace. I turned to the door and saw Amy still standing there listlessly, her lips moving.

I was alarmed by this and in a few short steps was by her side.

"Like clockwork…" Amy murmured. "Time strikes, and he appears…" Her face was pale and her eyes were unfocused. She didn't seem to see me.

"Amy?"

"He wanders to the end of the staircase, singing…he has to sing…."

"What do you mean? You've seen this before?" I said, unable to keep back the sudden accusation in my voice.

"No," said Amy, her eyes unfocused still. "Meg told me."

"Meg told you? Why didn't she tell me – us?" I demanded.

"I don't know," Amy said, passing her hand over her forehead. "It has something to do with Christine." Her eyes came back to awareness then, and she shut her lips tightly, looking at me uneasily.

I barely heeded that. "Christine!"

I had actually forgotten about her. Foolish, for of course that had been her pure voice rising out of the last chorus, the voice he caressed with his own. I couldn't hide from myself the unwelcome rush of envy that poured over me, for it would always be Christine. Christine of the bright future, Christine of the remote starry eyes, the inborn grace; Christine who apparently also had a connection to this mysterious and utterly alluring being.

"Don't you say anything to either of them, or anybody else, Rae," Amy beseeched me. "I shouldn't have said anything to you; I don't know what I was thinking."

"Don't worry, I won't say anything," I said mechanically, though I think she heard the lie as well as I did.

We left it at that, rejoining the others. I knew I'd have no chance to be alone just yet. Inside my mind was teeming with half-articulated questions, and meeting Lili's eyes, I knew this wouldn't rest with her either until we'd had a chance to speak privately.


	2. The Corridor

As Adele had noted, the door that the Phantom had come out of wasn't supposed to lead anywhere. In our free hours, all of us had explored the old hallway and the treasures in its rooms. That door revealed only a tall but tiny, dispirited cloakroom. It held only a rack of ancient, musty coats that must have been left by old denizens of the Opera. Nobody ever came to claim them yet no one ever threw them away.

We were playing hide-and-seek in this old part of Opera about ten days before this evening. Adele was "It," I remember, and she was such a poor winner that we tried to make it as difficult as we could for her. We used what open rooms and large pieces of statuary there were to hide in and among, upstairs and down; this hallway by the old practice room was less traveled on rest days like today and so we wouldn't be disturbing anyone by playing games.

Unfortunately all the best spots were taken before I could get to them, so I had unwillingly chosen the cloakroom, sure I'd be the first to be found. I was about to duck through the coats when Lili had come barreling in, knocking me through them and against the back wall as there was barely room for me as it was. Or so I'd thought.

The solid back wall of the cloakroom, suddenly uncomfortably close, seemed to collapse behind me as I fell out and down onto a hard floor. Lili was unable to stop her forward motion and came falling out on top of me, digging my back and elbows even more painfully into what was undoubtedly a stone floor.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Rae, I didn't mean to – where are we?"

"That's a good question," I said. "One that I might be better able to answer if you'd remove your elbow from my rib."

"Oooh, sorry," said Lili again. She scrabbled up off me and helped me up. Fortunately nothing had been torn – I hated mending, though we had to do it all the time. We brushed ourselves off, and then we looked around.

Torches were lit in brackets above our heads, one on either side across from the wall hanging open before us. Through their light we could see the dim outlines of the coats within the cloakroom; could see that we had fallen into a long, narrow corridor that ran in both directions.

Our torches shed the only light near us. Far down the right side of the passageway was another torch glowing softly high up against the wall, and I could just see the faintness of another further beyond. Looking to the left, I saw about the same thing. Above us, torn cobwebs above me gently waving back and forth against the stone walls, though I knew not where this current of air came from. From a distant source an irregular drip of water fell into the quiet. We were hushed, taking in the unexpected sight; foremost in my mind was a little thrill of adventure mingled with a greater fear of the unknown.

I stared off into the dimness that ran between the torchlights, and it seemed then as if one long sigh came wafting down to me from the shadows, carrying with it a resigned sorrow that touched something akin to recognition within me. With it came an undercurrent of a winding melody, as if a musical scroll was unrolling itself toward me. Its hint of danger I mistook for allure.

"We have to explore this place," I breathed, not knowing I was going to say it aloud.

Lili stared at me as if I'd suddenly taken leave of my senses. I hadn't, I wanted to tell her; I was finding them. But it was too soon for even me to realize what had happened.

"Explore this dank corridor? We'll catch our death of cold! Besides, we should tell the others what we've found. None of them could know about this place or they'd have said something."

"I suppose you're right," I said slowly, shivering a little. Until she'd said so, I hadn't found it chilly at all. "But wouldn't it be better if we had something to tell?"

"What do you mean?" Lili said, crinkling her brow in an expression I knew well.

"Don't frown," I reminded her. "Sure, we've found a corridor. An empty corridor. You know as well as I that Leonie will go dashing down here and find out everything there is to tell the moment we let her know. Don't you want to find something for yourself, for once?"

"Maybe," Lili said, unwilling to concede anything that would encourage me. She brightened as she continued. "When Adele looks in here she'll see right away that there's a door in this wall, we just have to wait a little longer."

"That's why we're going to close the door," I said, just a bit more calmly than I felt.

"You must have hit your head on the stone floor!" exclaimed Lili. She began to edge inside the open wall. "I don't want to get trapped in here!"

Her voice echoed down the corridor and I hushed her, not knowing why it was imperative that we keep quiet. Already on edge, she did as I said, though her lips were set mutinously.

"I've been thinking of that," I said, though I hadn't known it until I said it. "All we have to do is find what made the door open on that side, and then on the side of this wall, and we can close it and know we can always get back."

"Who do you suggest is going to test that out?"

"I will," I sighed. "But first let's find it, shall we?"

We studied the opened wall from the side of the closet to see if we could find anything that had made it open. I thought I found it in a small indent near the bottom of the wall that didn't match the pattern, where my heel could easily have struck. This solution didn't match on the other side; neither of us could find anything that seemed to serve as a depression or a lever. Bravely I gave Lili one of the torches nearest us and made her go back through the wall while I pushed it closed from my side. If I couldn't find the mechanism on my side, she would be able to rescue me, or at any rate find the others.

After the door closed, a small hook depended out from the top of the wall. On Lili's side, she (with some danger to the coats) found that a protruding knot evidently pulled the wall closed.

It all seemed so easy to find that it was a wonder nobody ever had before. For a moment I fancied that the sighing air had formed a figure behind me that was leaning over my shoulder, guiding me to the secrets of the wall; certainly we had found them more easily than I would have imagined.

We experimented with pushing and pulling the wall open and closed a few times. Our way back assured, Lili came back out into the corridor with me. I saw that she was lugging two of the coats.

"I don't intend to expire from cold even if you do," she said, somewhat tartly. "Here, put this on."

I silently put the coat on, grateful for her brusqueness, for it meant that she was starting to relax into the adventure of it all.

"Well, which way should we go?" she asked after settling her coat about her.

"That way," I said, pointing towards the right, not entirely serendipitously. "And we can leave the torch here. There's plenty of light down the hall. We'll just go to the next light, and see where we are."

Lili looked at me with an unreadable expression, but acquiesced.

"I don't know why I'm going along with this," she muttered as we set off. There was just enough room to walk side by side, though the bulky coats made our gait ungainly.

I was wondering why I was going along with it, myself. I was not really the adventurous type like Leonie, or the forge-ahead, elbows out, bullheaded type like Sami. If Joseph Buquet said not to go into certain sections of town after a certain hour, I didn't tempt fate by going traipsing there blithely; if the wearily superstitious Carlotta decreed that no one should pass her on her left before a performance, I didn't tempt certain painful retribution by doing it; and if Madame Giry said to be at practice on time, I didn't tempt life by lingering on the way.

So why this?

I pondered this as we passed out of the last glowing remnants from the first torches and into a shadow like false dawn. I half-closed my eyes for a moment, the better to feel the silent tragedy in the air that was still winging down to me and, now that I was moving toward it, swirled in my wake. It was that call that was drawing me on, rushing cleanly through me and around me, neither demanding nor indifferent, but compelling all the same. For a moment I thought I heard the music in it again, a mirror's image of an echo, of fairy bells on a distant, forested hill. This was why I was so compelled. I reached to grasp it and it drew away.

"Watch your steps!" hissed Lili, as I stumbled against her.

"Sorry."

"That light seems awfully far away," she said then.

"We're almost there." We weren't, but I couldn't stop now. Lili's hand crept, cold, into mine.

I don't know why it didn't consciously occur to us before this that lighted torches meant that someone had to have passed this way before, and perhaps frequently; but then I was caught up in following the pure tones of the passageway, the sorrowful sigh, and Lili was concentrating on the distant light itself with all she was worth. I didn't notice that the floor was ever so slightly sloping downwards, and neither did she.

Despite myself, the chill and closeness of the air and the utter solitude were starting to affect me. The shadow between the torches had deepened to first an indistinct and then a pitch-black gloom; it seemed that we were walking forever to the light ahead of us when suddenly the first few radiant tendrils touched our eyes.

Lili rushed ahead into the circle of its glad light, hugging herself with relief. Then she stopped and stared at something on the floor. The very abruptness of her action and the stillness of her form made me feel more ill at ease than I had this entire journey.

I hurried forward and made to ask her what she was staring at, when she merely pointed at the floor ahead of us.

Footprints faint in the dust were leading away from us, illuminated by the torch in its bracket above. Fainter still, lying beneath them, I could see more footprints coming toward us. Both sets disappeared in the shadows beyond this light to a slight glimmer down the hall. I became aware of how the feeling in the air had changed to a watchful waiting.

I don't know how long we stood there, staring silently at the marks, knowing what they meant, not wanting to know what it meant for us.

"We're not the first persons here," Lili said finally, quietly.

"We knew that," I said. "The torches are lit, after all."

Lili shuddered. "Yes, but…oh, you must know it, Rae, the only other person who could have used this is the Opera Ghost!"

_Opera Ghost_, cried the echoes as they wheeled down the hall. I cringed and so did she.

I was not immune to the fear that the very name carried, but something about it didn't ring right with me. I followed the thought that came to me.

"If it's a ghost, it's not a person," I said. "And only a person would leave footprints."

"What do you know about ghosts?" Lili scoffed, angry in her fright.

"Nothing, and I don't particularly want to either. But every story we've heard doesn't mention anything about his feet!"

Lili barked a laugh despite herself, and I could see that she felt better because of it.

I followed this up, eager to gain an advantage.

"It could just as easily have been scene-shifters," I said robustly if not very convincingly in my own ears. "After all, the stage was near here."

"Scene-shifters, here? But there's a prop room off the stage! Why would they need to come down here?"

"Well, how should I know? Isn't there a spare prop room somewhere back there?" I waved vaguely behind me, meaning the old part of the Opera where we were playing. It seemed so far away now, that game of hide-and-seek.

"Maybe…"

"Or maybe it's just an old part of the Opera. It didn't all appear at once, you know," I said, rather pleased with myself for thinking of it.

"Maybe," said Lili again. "It's rather narrow, though." But she seemed to accept my words. I surreptitiously breathed a sigh of relief.

Then the seclusion of the corridor came back over her, and she shivered once more, and she said what I knew she'd say.

"We should go back, Rae."

I knew I had to find the right words. "I just want to see a little further. This corridor can't possibly go on much longer, if I have my bearings right, it would go right through the stage."

"It is lower, though, remember, we fell down as well as out."

"Not that low. I would think that it would have to curve, though; see the way that light up ahead shines as if it's filtered through a curtain? We're seeing only part of it, which would mean that it comes from a curve in the passage."

"You're clever enough to have your own salon, you are," Lili said, half in admiration, half in disgust. "Or are you just talking for the sake of talking?"

"Oh, I've been around, you know," I said loftily, to make her giggle again.

"I suppose if you really want to, we can go on. But why do you want to?"

"Didn't you hear the music?"

I knew my mistake before I even saw the stunned look complete its passing over her face. I should have listened to my instincts, which now reminded me that I alone had heard its majesty, its tattered sorrow; its enchantment.

"Never mind," I said. "I must have heard it from the stage." Never mind that the walls seemed thick enough not to transmit any sound from beyond the corridor.

"Of course," Lili said, looking at me askance. But she dropped it, and I was grateful.

We drifted on, then, and the sighing of the air returned to me, and me alone.

There was just enough light to see that there was indeed a curve to the corridor before we came into the shadow once more. I could feel Lili regretting her every step, especially now that I had as much as admitted to her that I must be slightly unhinged. I hoped it wasn't affecting our friendship past mending. I just needed to go on, to find the source of this sadness.

We noticed now how the corridor was slanting downwards; more than once we took a misstep and had to grab at each other for balance. The cold stones seemed to wrap around us with an indifference that felt sinister. I didn't want to think of it as a mausoleum, but I did anyway.

Lili kept pace with me, grim and silent; no happy remark would reconcile her to this now even if my font of quips hadn't suddenly dried up.

Just before all sight faded completely from us, the glimmer I had seen ahead became strong enough to see the dust motes lazily golden in the air. It was shining from behind the curve ahead, and our eagerness to reach it made us fail to realize then just how far down the corridor had been taking us.

We rounded the corner into a burst of golden light and saw – nothing. The corridor curved into a blank stone wall. The one valiant torch showed us the darkened age of the stone, the disturbed dust, the jagged cobwebs – and nothing else.

Because of the torch and the footprints, we knew that this could not be just an alcove. I also knew it because of the air shading into music, stronger now than before.

I didn't even bother to speak to Lili for her uncompromising stance was withholding a fearful scolding – or worse, disappointment in me as her friend for leading her to such a place. So I stepped forward, disregarding the cobwebs, and started feeling about the walls. I had to find something to prove to her that this wasn't just a fearful waste of time.

In vain I searched for the same kinds of levers and depressions that we'd found on our cloakroom wall; in vain I ran my fingers in the dirt and dust in the floor edging the wall.

With a long-suffering sigh, Lili finally bent to help me too. I was grateful but had enough sense not to mention it.

"I don't think we'll find anything," Lili said after awhile, straightening up. I eased my aching back as well and was staring disconsolately back out into the corridor when her sudden clutch at me brought my attention back to her. Her mouth was open in a silent shriek and she gestured with her free hand toward the wall in front of us.

A section of the wall was silently swinging open. We pressed back against the wall behind us, shuffling over a little so the opening wall wouldn't strike us. Blackness poured out from within the widening gap and we heard, petrified, the echo of a footstep in a steady, merciless tread. It came as if from down a well, rising up to meet us in our terror; with it came the darkness shot through with a gossamer glimmer of light.

The music poured out of the death-like gloom, turning painful in my veins, painful and oddly triumphant, and a moan spilled forth from my lips.

This was enough to jar us both into action. Lili grabbed my hand and we were away from the alcove and running as hard as we could back down the corridor. We somehow managed to keep from falling, though our coats impeded us sadly with the now-rising slope; the music chased us in vain, though, as we never looked back.

There was the second torch we had come to; there were the distant pair of torches finally becoming clearer, never so friendly as they were now. We were panting terribly, our breath coming raw-edged in our throats. We scrabbled at the closed wall before collecting our wits enough to find the mechanism and yank the door outward.

We piled out into the mass of coats, frantically turning to pull the wall shut, then we burst out into the hallway and slammed the cloakroom door shut. Fortunately, the hallway was empty. As we stood there against the door, choking a little on our breath, we could hear sounds of merriment from an upstairs room.

"We…he…he may be coming after us," panted Lili.

"We'll go upstairs straightaway, but we really have to catch our breath first or they'll ask questions," I said. "Ugh, I feel like I'm suffocating." We were still wearing our coats.

Afraid to reopen the closet door and hang them back up, we took them off and stuffed them behind a large, rather hideous bit of statuary that had never seen better days. Lili was having better luck with calming herself down but I felt a little light-headed. I leaned back against the cloakroom door.

"Rachelle, what are you doing?" she hissed at me, tugging me away.

I wasn't quite sure. For a moment I was oddly reluctant to move from the spot. Did I want him to come out and find me? But there, I couldn't know where he was intending to go. We must have passed other hidden doors in that passageway, or so I imagined.

"We mustn't say anything to anybody," I warned Lili, gripping her arm in turn.

"Fine, all right, just let go, you're hurting me," she squealed. I let her go, apologizing profusely.

A head appeared over the banister.

"There you are," exclaimed Liana. "Adele gave up long ago. Where did you all hide?"

"Oh, we kept moving around," I said truthfully.

"Well, come up, she's driving us distracted with her complaints. Better still, hide somewhere and let her find you."

We exchanged a glance. Adele was an even poorer loser.

"All right," I said with an exaggerated sigh. "Give us a few minutes and we'll hide near the doors to the Opera."

"Good," said Liana, and disappeared.

"Sorry," I said to Lili.

"That's all right, I need the extra time to compose myself. I don't know how you answered her so calmly!"

"I don't know either, but it's a good thing I did."

We ran off to find a ridiculous hiding place that Adele would swear she searched before.


	3. Conversations

The echoes of the music faded away in my head as I slowly came back to the present. Lili was looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face, tinged with a resignation I did not then understand. I don't know what came over me, but I suddenly wanted to be away from them all, even Lili. I had to remain there, though, and pretend everything was all right. I adopted a listless expression, pretending I was mazed by fear. Beside me, Lili snorted.

Fortunately there was a distraction then provided. Sometime during my lapse of attention, a decision had evidently been made to see if the Phantom had truly gone when the music had stopped. It didn't seem safe just to assume that he had. Leonie was looking around the room as she announced that she was going to open the door. As her piercing gaze coursed by, it seemed to me that she was also mutely asking if anyone else would like to do it. She passed by me as if my slack expression had convinced her not to bother. I was not ill-pleased.

She also hurried over Sami, even though she looked eager to take up the unspoken challenge; Leonie was not one to let another take all the glory, even if she herself was rather nervous at the prospect. I idly wondered why she even bothered to inquire; still, that was Leonie.

So, with a martyred sigh, Leonie went over to the door. We crowded around, though still at a slight distance, and peered over each other's shoulders. Adele had wormed her way to the front of the pack, and I could see her almost unholy eagerness from her profile. It made me shiver.

Leonie put her hand on the worn doorknob. Everything else seemed to fade away to the edges of my perception; never had that door seemed so close to me as now when I was standing several feet away. Suddenly I was the one with my hand on the knob, feeling the various scrapes on its softened brass. I was the one ever so carefully turning it, praying under my breath that just this once the old door wouldn't make a sound. I could feel her fear that the spectre would be standing right outside, but mingled with that was my own ashamed admittance that I didn't want to see instead that he was gone.

And then Sami strode forward and yanked the door wide open out of Leonie's tentative grasp. A creaking, groaning sound sliced through the hushed air, ending in an appalling two-octave shriek as the door protested its treatment. All of us shuddered as if a wild breeze had swept among us, but Sami never paused as she continued thickly out into the hall, disregarding Leonie as a mere barrier to overcome.

"Can you believe her?" gasped Adele, in terror mingled with delight. She rushed in Sami's wake, though abruptly paused just inside the doorway. She completely ignored Leonie, who was looking flabbergasted at the brusqueness of Sami's passing, and was slightly teetering on her feet.

What was the _matter_ with Adele? I thought, having never seen her quite this way before. Lili beside me was shaking her head in disgust.

Vedette came to Leonie's assistance, and Leonie was ungrateful as always, but that was hardly of consequence now with Sami out there, alone in the shadowed hallway. The rest of us crept forward around Adele's sharp elbows and peered out from the doorway.

It was evident that no ghost had climbed the stairs, for Sami was making a show of peering over the banister. As we watched, she leaned way over the rail and then gasped, jumping back about a foot, bringing her hands up to her face. From inside the doorway, we also all jumped, even Adele, who whimpered in fright and backed up into Liana. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Vedette remained calm, so I gulped and tried to salvage my dignity. And as Sami turned, dropping her hands to reveal a malicious face, I was glad that I did.

"Hallway's as still as the grave," she remarked sonorously. For some reason she looked directly at me for a moment, her rather piggish eyes filled with malice. I struggled to show nothing more than mild interest on my face, but evidently failed as a grin split over her face. Then her gaze passed by me to enjoy the others' startled or sickened faces.

"Oh, Sami," reproached Liana somewhat shakily.

Adele straightened her costume and pretended that she had only been acting along with Sami; Sami didn't seem to care, as we all knew better. She stood there, grinning wolfishly, unrepentant; but then Sami had always fancied herself fit for the more dramatic parts.

"Well, come on," came Leonie's voice from off to the side. She evidently had recovered enough to realize she had let Sami take all the honors thus far. "Let's go congratulate them like we always do."

"Not that Christine ever needs our praise," muttered Lili next to me. I looked at her in surprise. Lili had never shown such an open distaste for Christine before. I saw Amy frown a little too, as if she'd heard.

I had forgotten about Amy. Now we looked at each other and I saw she wanted to say something more to me. But I was in no mood to hear any more protests that she wasn't supposed to have said what she did, or more insistence that I say nothing at all. It was already too late, and I think she knew it, for she abruptly gave up when Leonie started fussing everyone out of the room.

Lili shot me a warning glance when I started to follow obediently in their wake. As she was someone whose good faith I did value, I hung back, announcing in distress that I'd lost a button. Lili volunteered to help me find it. From the way Leonie turned and looked at me, I knew she was going to offer to help as well, but Amy ushered her out with the others. Amy knew that the others were more or less lost without their leader, and would have stayed in the room as long as it took us to find the errant (and imaginary) button. It was better to keep me from blurting out to the others what she'd said as long as she could. She knew I'd tell Lili; but better Lili than Leonie; better Lili than Adele.

No one inquired why Leonie chose the longer, alternate route through the upstairs hallway to get backstage rather than the more direct route downstairs. She must have been turning up the gas as they went for the light from the hallway increased; then Lili closed the door.

"That really was the Phantom, wasn't it," she said flatly, not really asking, her voice mirroring the frown on her face.

"You'll get lines like that," I said mechanically, turning away. But I saw her in the mirrors, still frowning, and in the mirrored reflections of the mirrors. There was no way she was going to be diverted, and she knew that I knew it.

"Rachelle, we have to tell them."

I remained silent, unsure what to say. Now that we had the opportunity to talk unheard, I was strangely reluctant to begin. I felt as if I were entangled in a dream where I was unable to move properly; as if I were back in that corridor.

Taking my silence for mulishness, Lili continued.

"What harm would it do now? They're going to investigate that cloakroom as soon as they can, and when they do, someone will remember that we'd hidden in that very place, and know that we must know its secret. Know that we've known it for a long time."

"Not so very long."

Lili's mouth twisted. "You don't seem to be taking this to heart."

I turned at that, more than a little hurt.

"I'm taking it very much to heart, Lili, but what can we do?" I said helplessly. "We were never supposed to go down there in the first place. You know as well as I that it will be unbearable for us here if they know we've kept this kind of secret from them."

"That's the very reason why we should tell them before they ask us," Lili persisted, though a note of uncertainty came through in her voice. "Besides, they won't even think of it that way. They'll be too caught up with exploring it themselves."

"I don't want them to explore it themselves," I muttered.

Lili stared at me in disbelief. I expected her to ask me why. Instead, after a pause, she said, "Rae…why did you start to creep down the stairs to that awful figure?"

"Awful?" I said, defensively. "With a voice like that? You know we've never heard anything like that in our lives, and we've heard the best here. Weren't you listening?"

"Weren't you looking? When he started turning toward us--"

"I was dragged away," I reminded her tartly. "And besides, you were the one who said I wasn't creeping down the stairs."

"Fine, you weren't creeping down the stairs, but you sure looked like you wanted to," insisted Lili. "I saw your face; it was as if you were fascinated, just like Adele, only in a different way…" And here Lili shuddered, though if it was more because of Adele or because of me, I wasn't sure. She took hold of herself and continued. "And I suppose you wouldn't have seen him when I did, after all. But I looked back just before I got inside the door, and I saw the light fall full on his face, what light there was…what face there was…" She shuddered again, an uncontrollable tremor, and I finally abandoned my hurt feelings and went to her, hugging her.

"Tell me," was all I said, but the calmness of my tone seemed to soothe her.

"He had a mask covering half of his face, but it didn't cover enough. It was as if I could see through his mask, that the light lit the hideous shadow from behind…oh, Rae, I'd have died of fright if he had looked up at us! I can't remember it again!" She started trembling again, and I bit back the relief in my voice and told her that it didn't matter, that I believed her; that she didn't have to tell me anything more.

The truth was that I didn't want to know. Perhaps it was that if Lili, sensible Lili, could corroborate the tales of his grotesqueness, the music I wanted to hold inside me would cease to exist. Even for the sake of my own soul, I already couldn't bear to picture myself without it; it was as if it had burrowed down deep inside me and sought life for it to grow. Fascinated, Lili had said; fascinated I definitely was.

She wasn't finished with me, however. She blinked at me from my protective grasp.

"We still have to tell them."

I sighed. "All right, Lili, all right; we'll tell them – but let's wait just a little while longer. What we really should do is talk to Meg."

"Meg? What's she got to do with this?"

I paced away a little as I told her all that Amy had said. I said little of my personal feelings; though Lili no longer seemed to be such a fan of Christine, I felt it better to hide my envy that disgusted even me.

"So despite what she said, we really should see what Meg has to say about it before doing anything else," I concluded. "Besides, it's not as if we really found anything definite…"

I trailed off as I saw before me the faded glory of the hallway, now with an opulent red glow around the scene in my mind's eye. I wanted that faded glory, I wanted the chimes of the clock, I wanted the soulful tones of his voice to come again and again, and enhance what I was hearing inside.

Lili shook her head at me. "You really did hit your head on that stone floor, didn't you," she said, oblivious to my inattention. "You keep trying to convince yourself that he's not the monster he so obviously is. Why are you?"

Because I knew she hadn't heard the music like I had, I couldn't quite respond, though I resented her implication that the stone floor from ten days ago had impaired my judgment now.

"Let's go join the others," I suggested instead, and Lili gave a little sigh. Well, let her be disappointed, I thought defensively; then there'll be two of us. Though I didn't want to face my reasons for being disappointed right then.

Lili pulled open the door and we set off down the hall.

"You know," she said to me musingly, "His voice reminded me of Christine's."

"Christine's?" I said sharply, finding I was ill-pleased that Lili thought so. It made my own half-buried suspicions seem too true.

"Yes. Something about the tone, or maybe it was the feeling behind it…" Lili shook her head. "I can't seem to express it too well, but if she has something to do with him, I don't think I'm mistaken. There is no doubt that something has happened to make her improve so much in so short a space of time."

"Even if he's the monster you think he is? Even if you don't like her?"

"I think she's in trouble," Lili responded gravely, looking aslant at me as we walked. "And I think that she doesn't know she is."

I really didn't know what to say to that.

Backstage, there was the usual uproar of half-dressed chorus girls popping in and out of rooms, harried men trying to move special, delicate props, and patrons surrounding the principal actors. Carlotta was firmly ensconced in the center of the gallery, seemingly oblivious to all but her admirers, who seemed tripled tonight. This at least kept her out of our way as we sidled along the outskirts to find Meg. Though she'd ignore us at other times, Carlotta was by no means above treating us as dogsbodies to fetch and carry for her. She had a special knack for spying a hapless second-string chorus girl in the crowd.

Amy saw us from where she was talking to her close friend in the main dance corps, Adele (fortunately nothing like our Adele), and I am sure divined our intent. Fortunately a prop-carrier passed between us so I could pretend I didn't see her look of entreaty.

We had no trouble finding Meg; she was in a corner by the least comfortable dressing room that Christine had been given when she became Carlotta's understudy. Though drafty and in some disrepair, at least Christine had a room of her own.

Meg was talking in a low voice to Christine, who smiled absently at us as we approached, and as absently accepted our congratulations.

"We swear that we could hear you above all the other voices," Lili said, gushing over Christine as if she had never had an unkind thought about her.

"You too, Meg," I added, glaring at Lili.

"Oh, you always say that," said Meg fondly.

"It's true, we could hear both of you," Lili insisted, unabashed. "And it was even more special tonight, because – ow!"

"Sorry," I said. "I lost my footing for a moment."

Meg looked from one to the other of us thoughtfully.

"I really must go," said Christine in her gentle, abstracted voice, and she did just that, vanishing into her tiny domain. I caught a glimpse of a great mirror within just before her door swung shut.

Meg looked a little apologetic for her friend's brusqueness.

"That's all right, Meg," Lili assured her, reading into her expression. "We really wanted to talk to you alone. In private."

"All right," said Meg, curious now. "Let's go where my mother won't find me for awhile, shall we?"

We grinned. Madame Giry was notorious for swooping down on Meg at all moments. Meg may have been exempt from Carlotta's opportuneness, and even then not all the time, but never from her mother's.

Meg led the way across the hall from Christine's shut door to a passageway that ran past the stage against the wings; here we could see all comers and still have enough privacy.

"I wasn't going to say anything in front of Christine," Lili hissed at me. "You didn't have to step on my foot."

"I'm sorry," I said again. "I just wasn't sure for a moment."

"Unlike you, I haven't lost my senses."

I was unable to respond to such a charge because Meg finally stopped after checking ahead to see if anyone was around. The only open room near us was the prompter's stuffy alcove, and she had long departed to join in the festivities. The opera had been doing so well that a late supper was now provided almost every night.

"Well?" Meg asked, her eyes roving from one of us to the other expectantly.

"It's really nothing, it's just--" I began, when Lili cut in ahead of me.

"Meg, we think we saw the Phantom tonight!"

Inwardly I cursed her abruptness. Meg's eyes grew wide, and her face took on a ghastly shade beneath her stage makeup. Then she moved a little, and the impression faded; it must have just been the light.

"Tell me everything," she said, in a voice quite unlike her usual light, happy tone.

Lili had to let me tell some of it, but she mostly did all the talking. I kept back to myself the way the music affected me, sang to me, haunted me even now, yet a little of that must have come out in my part of the narrative, for more than once I saw both of them look at me a little oddly. Both of us stopped just short of mentioning what Amy had said.

"So…" said Meg, letting out a long sigh. "How many of you know about the corridor?"

"Just us, and you, now," said Lili.

"Not Leonie?"

"I think Leonie and Adele at least, suspect something," I said, slowly.

"Yes, Adele," said Meg with a touch of irritation. "That one has a bad future ahead of her if she continues to--" She broke off as she saw our looks of interest.

"I'm talking out of turn," she said, smiling. "Listen. I have to tell my mother about this; she has to know he's been seen again."

"Do you have to tell her…everything?" I asked, quailing. Lili gripped my hand. Madame Giry was, to put it politely, a volatile person at best.

"I think it would be best, don't you?" asked Meg sternly, sounding for a moment like Madame Giry herself. Then she relented.

"It won't be as bad as you're thinking. My mother has known about the Phantom for a long time. She's rather protective of him, and he has never harmed her. He's polite to her, in a courtly way."

"Polite?" I began, incredulous more because it served my own instincts about him than because I disbelieved. I had been doubting my own senses after Lili's diatribe.

Meg was given no chance to expound on this because once again Lili interrupted.

"But Meg, what do you mean, 'again'?" asked Lili. "Does it have to do with the Phantom and Christine?"

"What do you know about Christine?" asked Meg sharply.

"I…uh…" Lili looked to me for support. I gave her a bitter look for her efforts, but plunged ahead.

"Amy said that--"

"Amy!" said Meg, and for a moment she looked really angry. Then she calmed herself down all at once – a trick I wish I knew the knack of – and let out a deep breath.

"I really know little more than you. It's really not mine to tell, and frankly, I don't know how trustworthy you two really are. Amy should never have said anything at all without coming to me first."

"She was just shocked," I said, feeling guilty that I got Amy into trouble. "If you'd seen her…it was as if she didn't really believe what you'd told her, and there it was, before her eyes."

Lili looked at me speculatively, rather dashing my sudden access of pride in being so insightful.

"The fact is, we _do_ know, now," Lili said pointedly. "Meg, we did come to you first, that alone should show you that we won't tell anyone else. Why, Rae said so, herself, back in the practice room. And it's just lucky that Amy told only Rae and Rae…told only me."

Whether it was because of the unpleasant truth of her statements or because she realized that we knew just enough to get into trouble speculating, Meg relented.

"You have noticed how her voice has been improving of late?" she asked.

We nodded.

"Well…she was brought up on tales of the Angel of Music. You may have heard her mention it."

We nodded again. Before she became the remote goddess that she was now, Christine had talked to all of us, though even that hadn't been all that much, even then.

"She believes that the Phantom is her Angel of Music, that he's come to her finally, to help her learn and better her voice."

"How could she possibly think that?" Lili asked.

"Because he's been visiting her," Meg said simply. "Because he's been giving her lessons."

"Visiting! Lessons!" I cried, unable to help myself. But I believed her, for it made awful, complete sense to me. But…why her? Why her and not me?

Meg didn't react to my tone. "Yes, one wouldn't think it, would one, with all these stories of him being so horrendous…but there it is, all the same. But he hadn't been seen walking the corridors for quite some time now – you've noticed that the stories you hear haven't been new - and never before has he been seen singing like that where anyone can see him, or at least…" She trailed off.

"So how does she hear him, then?" I found myself asking.

"On the stage," Meg said. "I saw them once, or thought I did. If my mother hadn't seemed to know all about it, I would never have believed it myself. But I heard him one night, when she was out on the stage by herself. I saw her, and heard her sing, and then heard him. I'll never forget that voice, though I thought it was a dream. I peeked through the curtains and saw nothing but her at first, but the longer I looked, the more I thought I saw a cloaked, hatted figure, but my mother found me and whisked me away."

Rather like my friends whisked me away, I thought.

Meg continued as if glad to finally have another ear to pour her qualms into. "I didn't know if I just imagined it that way because the tales always had him wearing such clothing, but then again, at the time I didn't know about him singing. There was no real reason to suspect that that was the Phantom. But I knew it was he all the same. I asked Christine about it later, against my mother's express wishes…" Meg broke off and grimaced at the thought. "And that's when I learned that this was neither the first time nor the second, and that he was responsible for her rise in the ranks to become Carlotta's understudy. I would not have called what I saw an Angel, but Christine persists in calling him that, and sometimes I'm not all that certain that she's wrong."

"But what does she do now, when the opera is running? Almost every night the stage is being worked on," I said.

"I don't know," Meg said, a little worriedly. "She must be getting her lessons some other way…"

"MEG GIRY!"

We all started. There was no mistaking the voice of Madame Giry. It could rasp through steel, it could shatter the fondest daydream, and it could instantly dispel talk of ghosts, even polite ghosts.

"Don't either of you say anything to the others until I've had a chance to talk to mother," warned Meg. "I know you're nothing like Adele or Leonie, or even Amy, though I thought she'd keep her counsel better--"

Over our voluble protests at such injustice, Meg held up her hands. "I just don't want everyone to start bothering Christine about him," said Meg earnestly. "Or to start hunting for him. I don't know quite what's going on, only that…"

"MEG!"

"I'd better go," said Meg, now looking nervous for all her years. "You had better cut across the wings and come back around through another door. No sense in having us all in trouble at once until I've had a chance to calm her down."

"I thought you said she'd be fine with it," I couldn't resist saying.

"There's no telling with mother," Meg shot back over her shoulder, already retreating back down the hall.

Lili and I were left looking at each other with dumbfounded expressions on our faces.

"So it really is true," Lili whispered.

"You always thought it was," I muttered disgruntledly. "You had no doubt that was the Phantom, or the Phantom's lair."

"Oh, Rae, you didn't either. But it's one thing to think you know all the answers, and another to know you know the answers."

"And yet there's so many more things I wish to know…"

"You'll get your chance soon enough, if I know Madame Giry," said Lili. "Come on, we've got to get back to the others, and this way isn't going to take just a few minutes, either."

We scurried off down the hall, and if we occasionally looked back over our shoulders, neither of us remarked upon it.


End file.
